I agree with you 99%, but calling Raul indolent and stupid is quite low. If ten times the number of people were willing to stand up to authoritarianism like he did, Brazil would be in a much better shape today.
I wasn't calling Raul indolent or stupid. I just mentioned that he (the poster) quoted a drug addict (who was also a very funny and talented musician) to achieve some kind of smart-ass "aha! someone important told this and that" situation.
I like his music. But he is still a dead drug addict that was mostly funny but not at all a good reference on most topics related to real life.
He was a person with a lot of qualities, but wisdom on what relates to "hard" aspects of reality wasn't one of them.
Good for you but I really can't care less how well you are doing
Actually, you do: "I'm referring to exactly the opposite of people like you, that rants and bitchs about everything, being grumpy and cheer-less all the time, and using that ant-grasshopper tale to justify their sad and boring existence".
Go drink your "happy poverty" kool-aid. I'm tired of know-nothing foreigners prasing something they don't actually know.
Honestly, you seem to be someone really stupid, to say the least. Do you even live in Brazil? It doesn't sound like you do...
Oh, another "intelligent" response. Brazilians love to ruin their own country while they're living at "party like there is no tomorrow" mode. But complain about their country and all of a sudden they turn into the greatest patriotic citizens in the planet.
I've never been to Brazil, but it seems like you suffer from some sort of cultural centrism. People around the world are different from you because of historical and geographical conditions over which they or you have no control. You need to accept that and not be so hostile.
I don't know if your metal deficiencies are due to poor English, or poor Portuguese, or general poor general grasp of semantics. What I did say was something in the lines of "certainly you understand there's no way around the "preto safado"" which means you can't get rid or avoid the lazy/slippery black man, which from your previous post on the complexions(read generalization) that define poor Brazilians, I felt would paint an image more suitable to your neo-con rationale. Furthermore, what could I possible hope to attain by calling you a "fucking nigger"?
That still makes you racist. I bashed poor, indolent people. And made a special remark about white, spoiled people. You're tagged them all as "fucking niggers". Shame on you.
Oh, I could praise the US with the best of democrats, but I could never praise it for its faults, which is hardly the point since the only mention I made of the US was suggesting that you emigrate to your beloved empire, the cite an opinion on Puritan work ethics, which not even you could disagree, except for describing it as neurotic.
"Ame-o ou deixe-o" (Love it or leave it, a motto from the dictatorship era). Now that's coming even from leftist idiots. =]
which is hardly the point since the only mention I made of the US was
You mentioned the US because that's part of your formatted character. Lots of latinos do that. Bash Brazil, and people will bash the US to "make things even", instead of thinking about the issues of their own country.
As I said: you people are just the latin, decades-old, version of the emo kid.
Hey did your girl/wife just left you or something? Because there's no need to insult anyone to get some attention. I know it's more expensive than in ranting in/. but you should hire a hooker. You'd be more relaxed by now.
Almost every single response to my post is "omg! get laid! we brazillians get laid all the time!! yeah yeah, beaches and hookers! booze is cool!". Thanks for proving my point about the latin population. That is what decades of populism can achieve if applied to a whole continent.
As unlighted as you are, you probably know this already, but I need to enforce my point: Culture is not just the "american" way to live.
And who said that? Again, another formatted latino with low-self-esteem. Everything to you people is about the US and never about your own things. The thing is, it's "hip" and "cult" to bash the evil empire, people like you feel smart by acting like that. But it's pretty fricking hard and boring to think about your own issues, about the things that make latin countries a nightmare to live. That's not "hip", it's too much of a "serious neo-con stuff" for your formatted, old-style, fake-intelligent latino stereotype.
Let's say that the US is NOW a big shithole. That doesn't exempt Brazil from being a backwards country with a long list of extremely serious issues.
and using that ant-grasshopper tale to justify their sad and boring existence.
Except that my existence is not boring and sad, as (because of a lot of hard work) I'm part of the middle-upper class. I travel to the beach extremely often and quality entertainment is a constant in my daily routine. I live in a fine neighborhood, eating at the best places in the city, always surrounded by friends and worrying about nothing except my personal life and professional desires. The urban places I use, from my home to the place where I work, including where I get my entertainment, are above the level of the average US city and can be compared to top US destinations.
Which is sad, if you consider that almost everyone else in the city is excluded from those kinds of "benefits". That actually bugs me a lot, which is why I always try to be involved with projects destined to making things better.
Life IS an ant-grasshopper tale. I worked hard years ago, and now I'm very comfortable. Some people do suffer from plain, old-style injustice, but a lot of people are suffering from their own past actions.
It's that the world is so crowded with below-average ignorant people like you that I usually get sick of it.
Yeah, a formatted latino talking about being below-average. You're just too self-important to notice that latin america is full of issues, and spending your entire life bashing the US and ignoring the place where you live is not helping things at all.
Your post only shows your lack of culture and education. I wonder if the education story to you told up there is really your family story there.
I'm not sorry for considering things like real-world issues. You just a self-apointed fake-intelligent feel-gooder. Now that's one thing where the US also sucks a lot: their modern society is getting flooded with stupid people like you. People with an excess of "cutsy" feelings and with a dangerous lack of real world considerations. Modern yuppies love to spread positive, custy comments about everything.
I called you a "fucking nigger"? You're the one gulping down those caipirinhas
You did call me a "fucking nigger". The word "preto" is equivalent to "nigger" and "safado" is not, in absolute terms, close to "fucking" but is quite close if you consider the context. If anyone doubts it, just find a free dictionary and translate "preto" and "safado".
From Michaelis:
safado
sa.fa.do
sm 1 trickster. 2 (também iron) rogue. adj 1 worn out, threadbare. 2 pop shameless. 3 bras immoral, pornographic. 4 bras, iron roguish. 5 bras upset, irritated, cross. 6 bras restless, agitated, naughty.
preto
pre.to
sm (pl pretos, fem preta) 1 Negro, black-a-moor. 2 black (colour). 3 a black suit. adj 1 Negro. 2 black, dark, jet, scooty. 3 sombre, sad, mournful. 4 bras, fig dangerous. 5 bras, fig difficult. as coisas estão pretas / things are getting bad. ficar preto to blacken. frades pretos monks of the order of St Benedict. pôr o preto no branco to set down in black and white, get something down in writing. preto como carvão coal-black, as black as ink. preto no branco pop in cold print. tornar preto to black. vestir preto to wear black.
otherwise no man in their sane mind would so blatantly defend neurotic New England work ethics, and would know such thing doesn't exist, nor can it be created outside the United States.
This was never about praising the US. You're just acting like the typical low-self-esteem latino idiot. I'm not praising anything else, actually, just bashing this shithole we call Brazil.
Anyway, enough discussing with a shameless racist idiot.
Calling an entire nations poor people "extremely indolent and dishonest" is absolutely disgusting and racist. One thing I noticed in my life is when you meet people from different countries the stereo types are actually quite often far from the truth. I read the Fodors guide to the UK. I am British and what it said was hilarious and full of crap. Bet your an American! Ha ha ha... I am such a hypocrite, but I just bet you are.
Bzzzt! Wrong answer. I'm from Brazil. I speak from experience, not based on international stereotypes.
Most impoverished people from Brazil ARE indolent and dishonest, a chacteristic that was unfortunately generated by decades of populism.
Sorry but this is nonsense Brazilians are NOT dishonest nor indolent IF we were this would be a Camboja not you guys holyday destination. And what abt impoverished idiots??? WTF?
Brazil is NOT the world's "holyday destination". Sure, some beaches and forests are beautiful, but so is the caribbean. Most tourists in the planet go somewhere else instead of Brazil.
The impoverished population of Brazil IS extremely indolent and dishonest and that is the first thing people from the US comment after returning from their trips. And most Brazillian people are pretty proud of their "jeitinho brasileiro".
And, BTW, I'm from Brazil too. Except that I'm proudly out of the group that includes most of the population. =]
You wanna know why all Brazilians are HAPPY ?
That's cuz the males have enourmous dongs and women are ALL beautifull, we are not a bunch of fat ppl like you guys that barely speak to each other, here we all have as much sex as one wishes
What a bunch of crap, batman. Most pretty brazillian chicks own their looks mostly to their European, Middle Eastern or Japanese origins. All other chicks look like crap. And most poor brazillians are becoming extremely fat.
we don't need to ride a benz to get chicks like you guys there need, in here there's no "Loser" concept simply cuz we doon't need it...
Sure there isn't. Almost every single Brazillian is a freaking loser, anyway. All those spoiled, drug addicted rich kids ARE losers, riding their fast cars right into DEATH. And all middle-class idiots with no values of hard work and sacrifice, pretending they're rich while they're not, are also losers. More than 99% of the brazillian population is composed of inferior human beings. And the worse part of the brazillian population are the white, party-all-day, spoiled, middle-class (yet not rich) idiots who were born with a lot of infrastructure and opportunities yet will only manage to achieve a life standard that is lower than the one their own parents can afford today.
The US is also composed by a large percentage of inferior people too. The thing is: the good ones are surrounded by opportunities and civilization. That doesn't happen here in Brazil. All we (the civilizated ones) have left is paying taxes and more taxes, so the rest of the population can keep sucking every single benefit they can suck out of the state.
Plus if it's so perfect why would they leave Brazil to come to the damp dark UK to work shitty low paid jobs?
Because the country just plain sucks for 90% of the population. While they have shitty jobs at the UK, can they live at secure and civilized places, with good infrastructure. Those immigrants from Brazil were born at places where people kill each other for nothing at all. Where they used to live (their neighborhood at Brazil), the chance of getting murdered by random drug-related crimes is huge. This (Brazil) country is entirely dominated by drug-related criminality, it is dominating our society and a good part of the impoverished population is drug-addicted, so they will mug you and kill you just to get a shot.
Fair enough if you don't like your country but saying stupid things doesn't get one over on "The Man".
Their attitude is all about "sticking it to the man". Poor late teenagers.
I'm truly at a loss where neo-con Brazilians are forged, but I suspect the use of mind numbing self-help books on an already compromised morality and inherent low IQ.
You're the typical pice-of-shit latino fake-nationalist idiot. See, your thing is not about loving and helping your country, but about hating the United States and capitalism in general. Why? Because it's part of the left-wing latino stereotype you belong to. The mechanisms that rule your formatted (you're just reviving the decades-old version of the today's emo kid) and hate-motivated behaviour are extremely obvious and don't deserve much attention beyond basic identification.
But, don't worry: you'll grow up some day. I just hope that it happens before it's too late.
Why don't you just emigrate to your beloved empire, where your entrepreneuring spirit can be truly appreciated?
Because I don't want to. I'm attached to this country for a lot of reasons, and one of them is true nationalism. Except that I don't practice it left-wing-style: a.k.a. bitching while doing nothing and hoping communism completely dominates the country so you people can execute anyone "subversive". After all, it's all our fault, right? We, the "neo-cons", are to blame for everything, poverty, wars and all of the rest!
The fact that I like this place wil never exempt the nation from its "backwards country" status. The thing is: I was simply bashing Brazil and then two or three bozos like you started to bash the US too, as if it was some kind of "worse place" competition.
People like you are never about making things better. You're only about destroying the society that left you out. I'm sorry that this kind of backwards hate, motivated by latino populist anti-american stupidity, completely dominates you. =]
I'm sure your wealth could afford you 1/10 of your current status
My biggest wealth is my education. In fact, I would be much better living (again) at the US, but I don't want to.
surely a clever man like yourself knows there's no way around o preto safado.
For people who doesn't know portuguese, he just called me a "fucking nigger". What a nice guy.
I'm afraid you know neither your country nor your promised land, go get an education already.
Sure, Brazil is great. After all, futile moments containing booze, chicks and happy people is all it takes for a country to be just "awesome", isn't it? I hope your kidney fails from all that "caipirinha" you people love so much. =]
replace "brasil" by "US" in you post and you have a pretty damn good description of the USA, dumbass...
No, I won't have a pretty good description of the US, because most things I described in my post can't be said about the US. That doesn't mean it's a perfect country.
the economical and technological success of US in the 20th century was mostly imported talent from europe and japan that ran to the americas after both world wars.
You're confusing a few, remarkable examples, with the whole thing. Your theory is based on the fact that noone from the US could create or build anything useful. Sorry, foreigners helped the US a lot, but not that much. Your anti-americanism is just part of being a sad, angry teenager.
if more people went to US instead of brasil, it was because the ticket to north america was cheaper because of the proximity.
Or maybe because the US was already a strong country, with a very strong economical and industrial base. And mostly because Brazil was just one giant farm, with São Paulo's economy mostly based on cofee magnates, and North-east's economy mostly based on sugar cane and other kinds of banana-republic crap.
in other words, SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!
No. Thanks.
oh, and according to the grates brasilian composer of all times, raul seixas, "the ant only works because it can't sing".
Quoting a drug-addict makes a lot of sense, considering my whole argument about being indolent and stupid.
Backwards place to live? You get that from experience?
I don't know about him, but I do get that same impression, and from experience. A lot of it. Brazil IS a backwards place to live. While people from the US do complain about taxes and how their money is used by the government, things in Brazil are not simply "worse" on that point. They're completely different, as the people who pay taxes in Brazil are not the ones using governmental services at all. EVERY SINGLE NEED of the brazillian middle class (the ones who pay for that big joke named Brazil) is provided by very expensive private services.
And the impoverished are not just "poor", as in "lacking money for basic elements of life". They're also extremely indolent and dishonest. They lack basic culture and effort to achieve any kind of progress.
They have access to an infrastructure that would be considered an impossible dream decades ago. The things is: a lot of jewish and italian people arrived at this very same land of crap, decades ago, without any money at all and none of the thousands of schools and no universal and free healthcare at all. Yet they managed to educate themselves and provide good education for their children (who are now 40-50 years old), without a single cent in their pocket. Their sons and daughters (who were impoverished children) are now members of the upper-middle class.
I'd live in any brazilian coastal city over any US coastal city. Warm climate, nice girls, drinking caipirinhas all the time, hapy music, happy people.
You forgot to mention "random drug-motivated murders". And also forgot to mention that all those "happy people" are actually impoverished idiots who would rather spend their entire day partying around the city than working hard to improve their lives. Remember the Ant and the Grasshopper? If not, it's a classic that explains a lot about those bozos you call "happy people".
And if booze is something that motivates you to some kind of decision about where to live, you need treatment, not a better city.
You obviously have never had to implement anything that needed to conform to a defined, published standard.
Yes, lots of times. Most specs aren't that well written or defined, some are extremely criptic and miss objectivity by a thousand miles.
Standard bodies are not composed of standards written by alien-like super-perfect humans.
If you had, you would never in a million years defend a ragged mess which can't even deal with Julian dates without referencing a broken proprietary binary implementation (Excel 97).
I'm sorry, but defending backwards compatibility is a pretty ordinary position. If you ever read stuff like ISO 9506 and lots of other, you'll find plenty of backwards-compatibility-motivated-nonsense that was inherited by the older activities of very big equipment manufacturers.
That's how engineering works: you can't just skip economics, as if it is not an important factor. Writing a standard to a big market, with a very large installed base, is not the same as maintaining a small open source project and making big decisions out of nowhere, breaking compat. all over the place.
And you wouldn't defend OOXML, in raving terms including liberal usage of boldface, all caps and ad hominem attacks, if you understood the difference between a properly written standard and one cobbled together in panic that large institutional customers would abandon a proprietary format over concerns of long-term data accessibility, bit rot and lock-in.
Sorry, but you're just a nerd who never got in touch with any serious activity that relies on standards. You're pretending you know a lot about stds, but in fact you arrived late to the game, and did it just because Microsoft was also trying to get in. Almost everything you consider a "concern" are common things at the standardization process.
The only and strictly single way of opening a OOXML document in its pixel/inch perfect form with every detail is having $400 MS Office '08 which even OS X version has some problems.
So I guess youre against official standards for HTML, right?
"You've completely missed the point. Any jurisdiction that signs into law a requirement for government to use standardized document preservation formats can now elect to continue using Microsoft Office."
FINALLY!!
Finally someone is actually being honest about their true motivations. This isn't about standards, this is about banning MS Office from government use! And a higher cause, of which I cannot imagine!
That was exactly my point on a previous message. This is all about creating a forced monopoly for ODF, and not about true technical issues. Most people want to just screw Microsoft over with this issue. They care about only "Governments being able to keep using Microsoft".
No, that is about banishing closed proprietary formats from govenment distribution. There is no provision at my country's Constitution giving Microsoft power to tax me.
I guess youre confusing "closed" with "from companies I hate", because OOXML is now a standard, even if you try to argue that it is a poorly-written one.
LOL. You clearly have no understanding of the ISO. They're responsible for thousands of standards in a wide variety of industries. Even if people ignored their computer-related standards, few would notice. The ISO is mostly known for their manufacturing process and quality control standards
Even worse: almost 100% of the people and companies who are the real ISO's customers and user base were in OOXML's favor. Not because they love Microsoft, or because they're dying to choose OOXML instead of ODF, but because they actually understand the standardization process, and having companies specify their formats (even when there are other standards on the same subject) is part of why we have ISO in the first place.
Those international standard bodies could not care LESS about what OSS zealots think. They're not relevant to their operations and existance.
What actually happened in this whole OOXML situation was OSS zealots making fools of themselves, in front of the entire market. Every smart person realised that it was just a silly, childish "omg, let's fight hard to screw microsoft on this one" festival of crappy activism.
A standards body is non existent if people/governments and large corporations openly accuses them or suspects fraud.
ISO was never accused of fraud by anyone relevant. The only time when "irregularities" were mentioned, it was related to Norway's own standard comitee, and not ISO's.
They would gather and setup ISO 2.0. If you think about JPEG being an ISO standard, you can imagine how important ISO is. Wonder if they will approve "HD Photo" from Microsoft as a ISO standard too?
So...? Lots of international standards, from ISO, DIN, JIS, ASTM and others are redundant. Those institutions aren't responsible for choosing "the format". Their job is to give a name to accepted technical specifications, to distribute them and also inspect how companies and products are being certified in relation to these standards.
Almost every single OSS nerd, even the ones opening anti-ooxml websites and posing as experts, are spweing this crap around the interwebs. Repeat after me: standard bodies are not responsible for definitive and unique specifications, lots of standards fill the same void and specify things related to the same subjects.
With that decision, they are open to every kind of accusation. A company can remind "OOXML" when a completely irrelevant standard passes which would be in favour of a large corporation.
Standards are not laws. Companies will only follow standards only if they're useful for the process of making money. Standards are created to allow the participating parties of a project, including the open market, to speak the same language. And that's not because they want to play nice, but because that saves money. If a standard is not relevant to the company's profit margin, it will not be used weather it was defined by Microsoft or by friendly buddhist monks.
Companies should ask themselves "What if Microsoft goes chapter 11 in matter of a decade" and decide their formats based on that. All computers I owned in 1980s were made by huge, untouchable large companies which nobody could even imagine their fall. It happened.
They should only ask that if their documents are not stored in the format defined by the ISO standard. If their documents are OOXML-based, your suggestion is pointless.
Stop crying, people. Start being HONEST.
on
ISO Approves OOXML
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Yes, this is a repost.
While everyone here is shouting "omg oh noes, teh microsoft ruinz teh ISOs!!! ISO suckz becoz microsoft is teh shit!", I cant see anybody summarizing the REAL motives and issues behind the whole OOXML controversy. And by real motives I mean "Anti-Microsoft people dont want Microsoft to obtain a public international standard on documents, so Office sinks (and Microsoft gets screwed) when governments start pushing restrictions on formats for their documents".
Lots of websites and groups were founded for the sole purpose of politically-motivated bashing of OOXML, while pretending to be about technical issues. A lot of people are complaining about small omissions related to optional behaviours such as Word 97 wrapping emulation and such.
Seriously, look at Wikipedias summary on "technical criticism". Out of 5 mentioned "technical criticism" items, two are just silly complaints about not using W3C formats, the last one is not even a complaint or issue, and the other two are valid questions, but small details that can be changed or ignored. What the hell, that Holloway zealot, maintainer of a site built only for this issue, managed to spew 17 pages of crap only to mention 6 (yes, SIX, SIX, on 17 pages) valid (yet minor) issues about OOXML. The entire document was political, with arguments that are nowhere related to a standardization process, such as "Microsoft is historically known for...". What's next? Telling ISO about how random company's CEO cheated his wife, so they can't accept the company's standard? What happened to TRUE technical analisys?
There are no real technichal issues that exclude OOXML from the class of standards that can be accepted by big standard comitee. A lot of people have tried to comment on this issue, even famous OSS developers, and they all received strong criticisms from the zealots that are fighting what is actually a holy crusade against OOXML, and not a valid technical opposition to a standard.
Is it time to admit that most people are against OOXML mostly because they hate Microsoft, and they want the standard to be denied so it might help Open Office and others, and not because they actually read the spec or analysed it. It is time for people to stop pretending that they're fighting for "purity on the standards process" and admit they they're just fighting for their own political interests. They're not mad because they're actually worried about the technical issues of the spec, but they're pissed off because this situation was a good opportunity to screw-up things for Microsoft.
This whole process has NOT turned ISO into an useless standards body and nobody except from geeky OSS zealots care about this. All engineers and big companies that rely on ISO for a lot of things will not change their minds about the institution. This is just about a bunch of grown-up babies crying and shouting.
Do you even understand what the fundemental purpose of an open standard is? Your comment suggests utter cluelessness on this matter.
ISO's "fundemental" motive of existance is not to provide the planet with cutsy, made-for-the-little-guy standards. Standard Bodies are not "free software ideology" repositories of "open" (in the OSS zealot definition) standards. They were created to allow companies (capitalistic institutions) with each other and also with governments. A standard is a technical document with a name, so the parties involved on a big project can speak the same language and so companies can build their services infrastructure and product definitions without spending excessive money (allowing things to be cheaper) to cover a large market.
"Therefore, ISO enables a consensus to be reached on solutions that meet both the requirements of business and the broader needs of society."
I repeat: ISO is not about making justice. ISO was crated to intermediate standardization processes that are relevant to big companies and governments. It is not an organization created to promote fairness and cute feelings.
What is with this highly prejudice statement. You can't just assume everyone who hate Microsoft have no mind, mind you. Of course, trolls are the most visible population, but it doesn't meant those who disagree with Microsoft are all short-sighted.
Disagreeing with Company X is something. But hating a company (which is not an individual, doesn't have a mind or personal ethics, or even ideology) is an activity that is monopolized by short-sighted nutjobs.
It doesn't matter who created OOXML, the problem is the proposal, which was hardly up to standard, but was pushed just because some large corporations have big money. The voting proccess is nothing but a joke.
You just described every single standard and standard body out there. Those institutions were not created to spread justice and fairness around the planet. Most standards are written by big companies and all others are created by other kinds of institutions (government departments, etc) but also related to big companies. And lots of non-company-written standards are written to officialize de facto standards that were established by lots of big companies.
The whole purpose of having a standard body is allowing companies, governments and other institutions to share standards based on their own activities. They are NOT some kind of "praise the little guy" club. And if you exclude activity-based standards, all you have left are "design by comitee" piece of crap standards.
The OOXML spec is NOT "hardly up to standard". It's a pretty good spec, with a small set of minor flaws. There isn't a SINGLE anti-OOXML website that lists more than a few technical-based issues with OOXML, and most of them are pretty minimal. Lots of international standards contain flaws of the same magnitude (or worse) than the ones found in OOXML.
And the voting process wasn't different at all from other big processes such as JPEG, MPEG and 90% of other important computer-related specs. The only different thing now is that OSS geeks are watching it, and complaining about the countries that did not vote according to their political beliefs. Voting on standards is a very boring, confusing and controversial process. It works that for for almost every single spec that carries some importance. But now geeks are paying attention to it, believing that everything is new and changed.
Some people are even spreading crap about "open standards", saying that OOXML can't get ISO approval because it is not "open enough". The whole ISO process is not about "open standards" in the definition of "open" that OSS zealots like to use. Lots of standards are written by capitalistic institutions and based on patented processes or proprietary components, etc.
Nerds hate monopolies...
...except the ones they define. People are pissed off because they wanted to abuse the standardization process to create a forced monopoly for ODF, but they failed. Forcing the market to have only a single spec for anything would be as insane as if ASTM forced the mechanical engineering world to use a single composition of carbon steel, because "we already have a standard for steel".
While everyone here is shouting "omg oh noes, teh microsoft ruinz teh ISOs!!! ISO suckz becoz microsoft is teh shit!", I cant see anybody summarizing the REAL motives and issues behind the whole OOXML controversy. And by real motives I mean "Anti-Microsoft people dont want Microsoft to obtain a public international standard on documents, so Office sinks (and Microsoft gets screwed) when governments start pushing restrictions on formats for their documents".
Lots of websites and groups were founded for the sole purpose of politically-motivated bashing of OOXML, while pretending to be about technical issues. A lot of people are complaining about small omissions related to optional behaviours such as Word 97 wrapping emulation and such.
Seriously, look at Wikipedias summary on "technical criticism". Out of 5 mentioned "technical criticism" items, two are just silly complaints about not using W3C formats, the last one is not even a complaint or issue, and the other two are valid questions, but small details that can be changed or ignored.
There are no real technichal issues that exclude OOXML from the class of standards that can be accepted by big standard comitee. A lot of people have tried to comment on this issue, even famous OSS developers, and they all received strong criticisms from the zealots that are fighting what is actually a holy crusade against OOXML, and not a valid technical opposition to a standard.
Is it time to admit that most people are against OOXML mostly because they hate Microsoft, and they want the standard to be denied so it might help Open Office and others, and not because they actually read the spec or analysed it. It is time for people to stop pretending that they're fighting for "purity on the standards process" and admit they they're just fighting for their own political interests. They're not mad because they're actually worried about the technical issues of the spec, but they're pissed off because this situation was a good opportunity to screw-up things for Microsoft.
This whole process has NOT turned ISO into an useless standards body and nobody except from geeky OSS zealots care about this. All engineers and big companies that rely on ISO for a lot of things will not change their minds about the institution. This is just about a bunch of grown-up babies crying and shouting.
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I like his music. But he is still a dead drug addict that was mostly funny but not at all a good reference on most topics related to real life.
He was a person with a lot of qualities, but wisdom on what relates to "hard" aspects of reality wasn't one of them.
Go drink your "happy poverty" kool-aid. I'm tired of know-nothing foreigners prasing something they don't actually know.
As I said: you people are just the latin, decades-old, version of the emo kid.
And who said that? Again, another formatted latino with low-self-esteem. Everything to you people is about the US and never about your own things. The thing is, it's "hip" and "cult" to bash the evil empire, people like you feel smart by acting like that. But it's pretty fricking hard and boring to think about your own issues, about the things that make latin countries a nightmare to live. That's not "hip", it's too much of a "serious neo-con stuff" for your formatted, old-style, fake-intelligent latino stereotype.
Let's say that the US is NOW a big shithole. That doesn't exempt Brazil from being a backwards country with a long list of extremely serious issues. Except that my existence is not boring and sad, as (because of a lot of hard work) I'm part of the middle-upper class. I travel to the beach extremely often and quality entertainment is a constant in my daily routine. I live in a fine neighborhood, eating at the best places in the city, always surrounded by friends and worrying about nothing except my personal life and professional desires. The urban places I use, from my home to the place where I work, including where I get my entertainment, are above the level of the average US city and can be compared to top US destinations.
Which is sad, if you consider that almost everyone else in the city is excluded from those kinds of "benefits". That actually bugs me a lot, which is why I always try to be involved with projects destined to making things better.
Life IS an ant-grasshopper tale. I worked hard years ago, and now I'm very comfortable. Some people do suffer from plain, old-style injustice, but a lot of people are suffering from their own past actions. Yeah, a formatted latino talking about being below-average. You're just too self-important to notice that latin america is full of issues, and spending your entire life bashing the US and ignoring the place where you live is not helping things at all. I'm not sorry for considering things like real-world issues. You just a self-apointed fake-intelligent feel-gooder. Now that's one thing where the US also sucks a lot: their modern society is getting flooded with stupid people like you. People with an excess of "cutsy" feelings and with a dangerous lack of real world considerations. Modern yuppies love to spread positive, custy comments about everything.
From Michaelis:
safado
sa.fa.do
sm 1 trickster. 2 (também iron) rogue. adj 1 worn out, threadbare. 2 pop shameless. 3 bras immoral, pornographic. 4 bras, iron roguish. 5 bras upset, irritated, cross. 6 bras restless, agitated, naughty.
preto
pre.to
sm (pl pretos, fem preta) 1 Negro, black-a-moor. 2 black (colour). 3 a black suit. adj 1 Negro. 2 black, dark, jet, scooty. 3 sombre, sad, mournful. 4 bras, fig dangerous. 5 bras, fig difficult. as coisas estão pretas / things are getting bad. ficar preto to blacken. frades pretos monks of the order of St Benedict. pôr o preto no branco to set down in black and white, get something down in writing. preto como carvão coal-black, as black as ink. preto no branco pop in cold print. tornar preto to black. vestir preto to wear black.
This was never about praising the US. You're just acting like the typical low-self-esteem latino idiot. I'm not praising anything else, actually, just bashing this shithole we call Brazil.
Anyway, enough discussing with a shameless racist idiot.
Most impoverished people from Brazil ARE indolent and dishonest, a chacteristic that was unfortunately generated by decades of populism.
The impoverished population of Brazil IS extremely indolent and dishonest and that is the first thing people from the US comment after returning from their trips. And most Brazillian people are pretty proud of their "jeitinho brasileiro".
And, BTW, I'm from Brazil too. Except that I'm proudly out of the group that includes most of the population. =] What a bunch of crap, batman. Most pretty brazillian chicks own their looks mostly to their European, Middle Eastern or Japanese origins. All other chicks look like crap. And most poor brazillians are becoming extremely fat. Sure there isn't. Almost every single Brazillian is a freaking loser, anyway. All those spoiled, drug addicted rich kids ARE losers, riding their fast cars right into DEATH. And all middle-class idiots with no values of hard work and sacrifice, pretending they're rich while they're not, are also losers. More than 99% of the brazillian population is composed of inferior human beings. And the worse part of the brazillian population are the white, party-all-day, spoiled, middle-class (yet not rich) idiots who were born with a lot of infrastructure and opportunities yet will only manage to achieve a life standard that is lower than the one their own parents can afford today.
The US is also composed by a large percentage of inferior people too. The thing is: the good ones are surrounded by opportunities and civilization. That doesn't happen here in Brazil. All we (the civilizated ones) have left is paying taxes and more taxes, so the rest of the population can keep sucking every single benefit they can suck out of the state.
But, don't worry: you'll grow up some day. I just hope that it happens before it's too late. Because I don't want to. I'm attached to this country for a lot of reasons, and one of them is true nationalism. Except that I don't practice it left-wing-style: a.k.a. bitching while doing nothing and hoping communism completely dominates the country so you people can execute anyone "subversive". After all, it's all our fault, right? We, the "neo-cons", are to blame for everything, poverty, wars and all of the rest!
The fact that I like this place wil never exempt the nation from its "backwards country" status. The thing is: I was simply bashing Brazil and then two or three bozos like you started to bash the US too, as if it was some kind of "worse place" competition.
People like you are never about making things better. You're only about destroying the society that left you out. I'm sorry that this kind of backwards hate, motivated by latino populist anti-american stupidity, completely dominates you. =] My biggest wealth is my education. In fact, I would be much better living (again) at the US, but I don't want to. For people who doesn't know portuguese, he just called me a "fucking nigger". What a nice guy.
Sure, Brazil is great. After all, futile moments containing booze, chicks and happy people is all it takes for a country to be just "awesome", isn't it? I hope your kidney fails from all that "caipirinha" you people love so much. =]
And the impoverished are not just "poor", as in "lacking money for basic elements of life". They're also extremely indolent and dishonest. They lack basic culture and effort to achieve any kind of progress.
They have access to an infrastructure that would be considered an impossible dream decades ago. The things is: a lot of jewish and italian people arrived at this very same land of crap, decades ago, without any money at all and none of the thousands of schools and no universal and free healthcare at all. Yet they managed to educate themselves and provide good education for their children (who are now 40-50 years old), without a single cent in their pocket. Their sons and daughters (who were impoverished children) are now members of the upper-middle class. You forgot to mention "random drug-motivated murders". And also forgot to mention that all those "happy people" are actually impoverished idiots who would rather spend their entire day partying around the city than working hard to improve their lives. Remember the Ant and the Grasshopper? If not, it's a classic that explains a lot about those bozos you call "happy people".
And if booze is something that motivates you to some kind of decision about where to live, you need treatment, not a better city.
Standard bodies are not composed of standards written by alien-like super-perfect humans. I'm sorry, but defending backwards compatibility is a pretty ordinary position. If you ever read stuff like ISO 9506 and lots of other, you'll find plenty of backwards-compatibility-motivated-nonsense that was inherited by the older activities of very big equipment manufacturers.
That's how engineering works: you can't just skip economics, as if it is not an important factor. Writing a standard to a big market, with a very large installed base, is not the same as maintaining a small open source project and making big decisions out of nowhere, breaking compat. all over the place. Sorry, but you're just a nerd who never got in touch with any serious activity that relies on standards. You're pretending you know a lot about stds, but in fact you arrived late to the game, and did it just because Microsoft was also trying to get in. Almost everything you consider a "concern" are common things at the standardization process.
Those international standard bodies could not care LESS about what OSS zealots think. They're not relevant to their operations and existance.
What actually happened in this whole OOXML situation was OSS zealots making fools of themselves, in front of the entire market. Every smart person realised that it was just a silly, childish "omg, let's fight hard to screw microsoft on this one" festival of crappy activism.
Almost every single OSS nerd, even the ones opening anti-ooxml websites and posing as experts, are spweing this crap around the interwebs. Repeat after me: standard bodies are not responsible for definitive and unique specifications, lots of standards fill the same void and specify things related to the same subjects. Standards are not laws. Companies will only follow standards only if they're useful for the process of making money. Standards are created to allow the participating parties of a project, including the open market, to speak the same language. And that's not because they want to play nice, but because that saves money. If a standard is not relevant to the company's profit margin, it will not be used weather it was defined by Microsoft or by friendly buddhist monks. They should only ask that if their documents are not stored in the format defined by the ISO standard. If their documents are OOXML-based, your suggestion is pointless.
Yes, this is a repost.
While everyone here is shouting "omg oh noes, teh microsoft ruinz teh ISOs!!! ISO suckz becoz microsoft is teh shit!", I cant see anybody summarizing the REAL motives and issues behind the whole OOXML controversy. And by real motives I mean "Anti-Microsoft people dont want Microsoft to obtain a public international standard on documents, so Office sinks (and Microsoft gets screwed) when governments start pushing restrictions on formats for their documents".
Lots of websites and groups were founded for the sole purpose of politically-motivated bashing of OOXML, while pretending to be about technical issues. A lot of people are complaining about small omissions related to optional behaviours such as Word 97 wrapping emulation and such.
Seriously, look at Wikipedias summary on "technical criticism". Out of 5 mentioned "technical criticism" items, two are just silly complaints about not using W3C formats, the last one is not even a complaint or issue, and the other two are valid questions, but small details that can be changed or ignored. What the hell, that Holloway zealot, maintainer of a site built only for this issue, managed to spew 17 pages of crap only to mention 6 (yes, SIX, SIX, on 17 pages) valid (yet minor) issues about OOXML. The entire document was political, with arguments that are nowhere related to a standardization process, such as "Microsoft is historically known for...". What's next? Telling ISO about how random company's CEO cheated his wife, so they can't accept the company's standard? What happened to TRUE technical analisys?
There are no real technichal issues that exclude OOXML from the class of standards that can be accepted by big standard comitee. A lot of people have tried to comment on this issue, even famous OSS developers, and they all received strong criticisms from the zealots that are fighting what is actually a holy crusade against OOXML, and not a valid technical opposition to a standard.
Is it time to admit that most people are against OOXML mostly because they hate Microsoft, and they want the standard to be denied so it might help Open Office and others, and not because they actually read the spec or analysed it. It is time for people to stop pretending that they're fighting for "purity on the standards process" and admit they they're just fighting for their own political interests. They're not mad because they're actually worried about the technical issues of the spec, but they're pissed off because this situation was a good opportunity to screw-up things for Microsoft.
This whole process has NOT turned ISO into an useless standards body and nobody except from geeky OSS zealots care about this. All engineers and big companies that rely on ISO for a lot of things will not change their minds about the institution. This is just about a bunch of grown-up babies crying and shouting.
"to interact with each other and also with governments"
From ISO's page:
"Therefore, ISO enables a consensus to be reached on solutions that meet both the requirements of business and the broader needs of society."
I repeat: ISO is not about making justice. ISO was crated to intermediate standardization processes that are relevant to big companies and governments. It is not an organization created to promote fairness and cute feelings.
Disagreeing with Company X is something. But hating a company (which is not an individual, doesn't have a mind or personal ethics, or even ideology) is an activity that is monopolized by short-sighted nutjobs.
You just described every single standard and standard body out there. Those institutions were not created to spread justice and fairness around the planet. Most standards are written by big companies and all others are created by other kinds of institutions (government departments, etc) but also related to big companies. And lots of non-company-written standards are written to officialize de facto standards that were established by lots of big companies.
The whole purpose of having a standard body is allowing companies, governments and other institutions to share standards based on their own activities. They are NOT some kind of "praise the little guy" club. And if you exclude activity-based standards, all you have left are "design by comitee" piece of crap standards.
The OOXML spec is NOT "hardly up to standard". It's a pretty good spec, with a small set of minor flaws. There isn't a SINGLE anti-OOXML website that lists more than a few technical-based issues with OOXML, and most of them are pretty minimal. Lots of international standards contain flaws of the same magnitude (or worse) than the ones found in OOXML.
And the voting process wasn't different at all from other big processes such as JPEG, MPEG and 90% of other important computer-related specs. The only different thing now is that OSS geeks are watching it, and complaining about the countries that did not vote according to their political beliefs. Voting on standards is a very boring, confusing and controversial process. It works that for for almost every single spec that carries some importance. But now geeks are paying attention to it, believing that everything is new and changed.
Some people are even spreading crap about "open standards", saying that OOXML can't get ISO approval because it is not "open enough". The whole ISO process is not about "open standards" in the definition of "open" that OSS zealots like to use. Lots of standards are written by capitalistic institutions and based on patented processes or proprietary components, etc.
Nerds hate monopolies...
While everyone here is shouting "omg oh noes, teh microsoft ruinz teh ISOs!!! ISO suckz becoz microsoft is teh shit!", I cant see anybody summarizing the REAL motives and issues behind the whole OOXML controversy. And by real motives I mean "Anti-Microsoft people dont want Microsoft to obtain a public international standard on documents, so Office sinks (and Microsoft gets screwed) when governments start pushing restrictions on formats for their documents".
Lots of websites and groups were founded for the sole purpose of politically-motivated bashing of OOXML, while pretending to be about technical issues. A lot of people are complaining about small omissions related to optional behaviours such as Word 97 wrapping emulation and such.
Seriously, look at Wikipedias summary on "technical criticism". Out of 5 mentioned "technical criticism" items, two are just silly complaints about not using W3C formats, the last one is not even a complaint or issue, and the other two are valid questions, but small details that can be changed or ignored.
There are no real technichal issues that exclude OOXML from the class of standards that can be accepted by big standard comitee. A lot of people have tried to comment on this issue, even famous OSS developers, and they all received strong criticisms from the zealots that are fighting what is actually a holy crusade against OOXML, and not a valid technical opposition to a standard.
Is it time to admit that most people are against OOXML mostly because they hate Microsoft, and they want the standard to be denied so it might help Open Office and others, and not because they actually read the spec or analysed it. It is time for people to stop pretending that they're fighting for "purity on the standards process" and admit they they're just fighting for their own political interests. They're not mad because they're actually worried about the technical issues of the spec, but they're pissed off because this situation was a good opportunity to screw-up things for Microsoft.
This whole process has NOT turned ISO into an useless standards body and nobody except from geeky OSS zealots care about this. All engineers and big companies that rely on ISO for a lot of things will not change their minds about the institution. This is just about a bunch of grown-up babies crying and shouting.